Capacity of single carrier systems with frequency-domain equalization

This paper deals with the capacity behavior of single carrier modulation with frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE) systems in broad-band multipath fading environments for the case where the channel is unknown at the transmitter and perfectly known at the receiver. The capacity performance of SC-FDE system is compared with that of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system. And the influence of the propagation environment and system parameters on capacity of these systems is studied. A useful conclusion is obtained that the expected capability of the SC-FDE is always poorer than that of OFDM in frequency-selective fading channel, and it is closer to OFDM in channel with lower delay spread. Furthermore, it is found that although the expected capacity of SC-FDE decreases with increasing delay spread, the outage probability may decrease as a result of the frequency diversity.